A Busy Week

Looks like I’ll be busy next week. Monday, I’ll be speaking at the Columbus Ruby Brigade. Wednesday, the Columbus JavaScript Usergroup. And Thursday, I present at the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group.

At the Columbus Ruby Brigade, I’ll be presenting “Machine Learning for Gamers: Dungeon Forecasts & Dragon Regressions”. It introduces machine learning concepts using fun D&D examples!

At the Columbus JavaScript Usergroup and the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group, the talk is “Machine Learning for Fun: Finding Bigfoot with the Nexosis API”. We’ll predict the future number of Bigfoot sightings, measure the impact of the X-Files on sightings in the 90s, and explain the Bigfoot Classinator.

You should come and check them out. Or tell your friends. Or both.

— February 15, 2018

Eat Sleep Code

While at Music City Code in Nashville last month I had the privilege of recording an episode of the Eat Sleep Code Podcast with Ed Charbeneau. It’s been posted to SoundCloud and you can check it out now. It should show up in iTunes and places like that in a couple of days.

Apparently, I talked about Putting the D&D in TDD, refactoring, and all sorts of stuff. But, really, it’s all just a blur. Go check it out and tell me what I said! Thanks!

— September 23, 2016

Prairie.Code() 2016 - Des Moines

I have been selected to present jQuery & 10,000 Global Functions at Prairie.Code() this year. And, George Walters and I will be Putting the D&D in TDD for a whole new mess of Midwesterners.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Des Moines and I’m really looking forward to it. I used to travel there quite a bit when I worked for Nationwide. The food was great, the people were friendly, and the traffic was light. I’m especially looking forward to checking out the The Forge that my employer, Pillar, has built there. Should be a good time.

So, if you find yourself in the area or you’re someone from back in the Nationwide days, look me up. I’m always happy to chat!

— August 8, 2016

Music City Code 2016 - Nashville

George Walters and I will once again be Putting the D&D in TDD. This time it’s at Music City Code in Nashville. We’ll be presenting and facilitating all day on August 18th. If you’re in the area, come and check it out.

— July 16, 2016

jQuery & 10,000 Global Functions

I spoke at StirTrek a few weeks ago and they did me the service of recording my talk. It is entitled jQuery & 10,000 Global Functions: Working with Legacy JavaScript and I present it here for your perusal.

The talk consists of a discussion on where legacy code comes from, some good strategies for dealing with it, some bad strategies to avoid, and lots of specific techniques more specific to JavaScript.

The slides for this talk are on SlideShare and, given that there is a lot of code on them, they might be a handy reference. Check ‘em out.

In preparation for this talk I put together an exercise foolishly thinking I might have time during the talk to actually do some coding to provide some more concrete examples. I ran out of time but the exercise is still out there if you want to practice some of these techniques.

I also plan to record a series of screencasts where I show off some of these techniques against this repository. Watch for those here or on my YouTube channel.

— June 23, 2016